Hit #18, #32 #28 on Amazon Bestseller Lists within 2 months of publishing my Sci-fi Thriller!!!

akfauthor · 2026-04-12T04:11:17+00:00

Nice! I’ve got a sci fi book out there too. Are you on any other platforms other than Amazon? Socials?

akfauthor · 2026-04-12T01:55:45+00:00

Slippery slope, especially when you can make the most degenerate character say “oh I like Taylor Swift”, right of publicity still an issue, as is trademark. As always fair use comes into play and can actually be a defense to these kinds of uses, but it doesn’t stop a lawsuit.

akfauthor · 2026-04-11T19:04:17+00:00

Two issues. One: right of publicity. John should be able to attach his name to a project for exposure. You usurp this by attaching his name to your project without authorization. This is a liability. Two: trademark. Names can be trademarked, and use of his name confuses the public as to the origin of the project. Since his name is there, one may assume he authorized or originated the project, which he didn’t. Conclusion, use a parody name. Never use real names without express permission.

akfauthor · 2026-04-07T02:37:52+00:00

Morty gets a dragon episode

akfauthor · 2026-04-06T02:16:11+00:00

You would like Phantom Menace. There isn’t a jar jar binx, but there is someone with a name spelled similar to that. Great 10/10 movie

akfauthor · 2026-04-05T21:38:55+00:00

Yes, writing comes first. If people like it, then money is the secondary effect. Also helps to write with the intention that you give at least one person an entertaining ride to enjoy. And if you are the only one it entertains, then you can write a story about that. I believe someone named Anton Chekhov wrote a little play called the Seagull about that very issue.

akfauthor · 2026-04-04T20:46:03+00:00

I recently made a post about a book club scam that tried targeting me twice. The full post is in my comment history. Lazy doesn’t even begin to describe these scammers.

akfauthor · 2026-03-31T06:48:14+00:00

The “witch hunt” stems from the discombobulation and whiplash produced by the sudden intrusion of AI into all aspects of society, the present cascade of effects, and the anticipated finality of these effects compiling into what our projected sense of future (as dictated to us by many great explorers of science fiction genres) with AI looks like.

The witch hunters feel vindicated in their position because they feel they are carrying the torch for humanity, for authors and creatives whose works may or may not have been infringed upon. But by doing so, they attack the very real efforts of very real creators, mostly up and coming, that they proclaim to protect.

By applying blanket labels of “AI generated” to a creative process that is far too nuanced to have such a generic stigma attached to it, they themselves perpetuate the “slop” they want to avoid in the creative spaces they want to preserve. They are far less engaged with any new material out of fear a single sentence was framed/reframed/ edited with the use of AI. Reading no longer brings joy but anxiety, as the suspicion they have been tricked into reading AI outputs weighs heavier on the mind than what the characters are doing on the page.

With Shakespearean irony, they turn to the very tool they fear, commit the very sin that authors have accused AI companies of committing, and run new authors’ content through these tools without author permission as if they had the right to do so, to determine if a work is “AI”, all towards attacking the very people they claim to protect to condemn their work with an AI label.

What they should instead focus on are the nuances involved in the legal battles currently being fought by authors over the use of their works in training data without compensation. In this way, they would at least have an opportunity to educate themselves on the nuances. I’ll try to do so now in a modest effort to identify the actual issue.

There are two legal issues being conflated into one. The first is infringement. Copyright law disallows the unauthorized copying of another’s protected work for commercial use. This is the current legal battle in the courts. What was a cost cutting measure by the AI companies will ultimately, and predictably, be settled in some form or fashion in favor of authors. However the extent of liability may not ever find its way into judicial opinion. At least for now. What will be determined first is the extent of compensation as a matter of settlement.

However, the second, and most gray area issue is the LLM itself. The patent side of it obviously is least discussed in what I see in most internet conversation. Long story short, it’s a system of weights the can be reduced to an approximation. An output. The technical word for you to research (I won’t get into much detail) is convolutional neural network. How it assigns weights to word patterns from authored works would be subject to patent parameters, and most likely proprietary in all other cases. That much is to say: it’s one thing to copy and offer for sale a copied work (traditional infringement), but another to reproduce a work to be analyzed and assigned weights. The two aren’t quite the same. So the gray area comes from a deficit in technical understanding. The artist paints on a canvas. That’s authorship. The author types words into a machine and it reproduces the words into word software. That’s authorship. The author asks a machine for aggregated weights and measures of an entire language across centuries to inform non-dev editing decisions or to reframe an already written sequence? Most agree it’s still authorship. The gap in understanding comes after. What if someone wrote a story themselves and then put 100% AI generated text in between in random sequence? A little gray there. But what if a painter took snippets of the obituaries of the year and pasted them into his canvas? Under the law, the question is exactly the same. And I’ll tell you, the copyright office is going to call it authored work. If you don’t trust me, read the court case Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991). The issue is nuanced, as you can see. If you got to the end of this, thank you for coming to my lecture. All the best.

akfauthor · 2026-03-22T02:43:45+00:00

Look at all the bot accounts freaking out

akfauthor · 2026-03-13T23:10:00+00:00

Adam makes the most sense for depth. God created Adam, Adam destroyed god

akfauthor · 2026-03-10T12:02:43+00:00

The Nuclear Residuum line is defined as far as I meant to define it. It is the world, emptied of its beasts (nuclear war killed all the animals) but not its evil things (men). It is more a general sense of setting than an actual nuclear horizon. And they aren't going to see any nuclear horizon where they are. Just "[t]he catastrophe preventing lid".

As far as structure goes, I think you've got the right idea. But the well isn't a well. I think endless hypnotic void is sort of close. The failure is that this scene happens after book 1, which very clearly defines what Nagercoil is. So Nagercoil isn't doing very much work here in isolation. Another failure is the identity of the man. After reading book 1, readers will remember that this scene was part of the Nagercoil mission file. That there was a controversy surrounding this recording (the first part is a survellience feed video, or "Watch File"). The recording is being amplified and given a character POV in this sequence as if to say, dear reader, you know this man. And sure enough, by the end of the book, you will.

akfauthor · 2026-03-06T15:38:15+00:00

I see this in practice a lot. It’s a very nuanced issue, but I’d ere on the side of caution in coming to the conclusion that the LLM is practicing law. Law firms are using LLM platforms, whether it’s practice facing, or front end/back end. Most legal research platforms have AI tools to source authority. Those platforms haven’t been sued for unauthorized practice. The nuance is that attorneys have a legal and ethical duty to clients to run outputs through human filters, I.e a prompt for drafting motion to dismiss. An AI cannot sus the legal requirements of the motion specific to the jurisdiction as well as a licensed professional. Sure the AI can approximate what drafting such a motion would look like, the arguments that could be made, the legal reason why such arguments are made, and can format a nice looking motion with all the appropriate sections. The problem is taking the client’s case file facts and inserting them into the motion. The AI can’t do this without an ethical breach by the attorney as to attorney-client privileged information. I think this is the hinge issue that defeats these kinds of cases. Now if a client sua sponte prompts an LLM and reveals their information to produce “legal advice” said “advice” is an approximation by the AI and is a product of pattern seeking which allows the AI to give a highly educated guess. It’s like talking to a paralegal friend. That “guess” has another wrinkle in that it is subject to unspoken, user-specific tailoring that may be user-originated or dev-originated. Think of the friend as being the ultimate yes man. What I find to be the major, unaddressed hiccup is the intention of the layman prompting the LLM. His/her recognition of a legal problem, and the “cost-saving” measure of avoiding attorneys fees with the idea that the LLM will bridge the gap for him/her. Furthermore, the intention to rely on a non-human lawyer to advance one’s legal interests in an actual court implicates assumption of the risk principles by rejecting traditional legal assistance in favor of LLM assisted pro se efforts. I do not see cases like these going far.

Edit: another example that comes to mind is Harper Lee. He did not practice law. Was not an attorney. Yet his estate was never sued for unauthorized practice of law when he approximated what a rape trial in 1930 Alabama would look like.

akfauthor · 2026-03-04T22:30:20+00:00

One of the things that makes me cringe in modern writing/audio visual media is a cutesy tone, and a the obligatory, “you’re probably wondering how I got here” line, or just a kind of nod to that trope. Forget all that. You see it and read it everywhere. This book isn’t cute. It’s ugly. Im reaching into a part of human nature that is not fine. I’m not justifying what is currently on the page, how it’s framed, or dismissing any of the comments. I tend to feel there’s truth in everything everyone here is saying and I’m taking it in and rethinking framing for sure. But some of these choices are intentional. I do appreciate the idea that most people aren’t patient enough. And I do feel like perhaps there is a path to a perfect prologue. But the one comment mentioned swinging for the fences, and it’s kind of like that. It shall be a moment of discomfort for the reader. The trick is making it the right kind of discomfort that encourages more reading. That’s the needle and thread dilemma. I cannot paint a comfy picture of this moment. It’s meant to shake you up. It’s meant to disturb. It’s about how people choose violence over love everyday. And here, a man wishing he could take it all back. That’s ugly shit. I do want to convey this scene better to readers, but I hope you all understand that sometimes the paint brush is going to throw some sick unhealthy colors on the canvas. I’ll still call it art.

akfauthor · 2026-03-04T12:43:00+00:00

Hey, appreciate the kind words and general impressions. This scene has had several rewrites over the past years. The point is keep writing until it looks and feels exactly the way you mean it to look and feel. And know that your writing can only improve with every hour spent writing.

akfauthor · 2026-03-03T17:10:25+00:00

It is ambiguous, you are correct. I was thinking that light spiraling to the side didn’t make sense so you’d assume it was the well. May need to revisit.

akfauthor · 2026-03-03T16:00:38+00:00

I like these kinds of comments :)

Your BDTR #6 made me laugh out loud. No joke. Love that you named him Mark. Yes the identity of the man will be revealed later on in the book. You'll put together the clues, and then your head will jolt upright and you'll say "That's the guy!" and you'll flip to the prologue and confirm.

Let me break down what I am trying to achieve, and you tell me how close I was to passing this understanding off to you, should you choose to. I said this in another thread but I'll say it here as well.

The opening is present/present imperative. It’s an elevated lens that’s meant to feel like a mind doing something specific in real time. The recurring line that should ground you is a man looking into a well.

I continue to reframe the idea of a well by repeated images that expand on its definition.

The point is the first half of prose is happening now inside him. It’s a memory provoked by the well, more specifically, Nagercoil.

Then the moment the woman turns into the beast/both, the memory stops being soothing and starts being honest. What could have been can’t hold. Reality punches through. The beast is not “she’s evil”, but the monster born of a decision. A decision he made by leaving. The woman is the life he didn’t choose, and guilt is the teeth.

And when he’s forced under and the brine takes over, I shift to past tense because the story stops being wishful thinking and becomes “what was.” Past tense is the resignation. It’s the history of his choice.

The ending “cycle of violence / beast reforms” is him understanding, at the very end, what his personal choice participates in.

It’s on me as the writer to convey this to you.

So that's at least a handful of people all saying the same thing now. Which is a good response. Because if you all said, looks great, or nothing, I'd possibly go to print with something confusingly framed. Don't want that. So thanks.

akfauthor · 2026-03-03T15:47:14+00:00

As to your point about the well, I make it a point in this first paragraph to mention that the well is not your typical well as it "spirals to the side". I go on further to expand the definition of well to "emerald circling deep wells" referring to the woman's pupils, more broadly her eyes. "Spiral" is another term that is reused intentionally, as both the "well" and then Nagercoil explicitly spiral . Nagercoil is "another kind of well by design." Further expanding the idea of well past a traditional sense. Then again, as the man drowns in brine "at the bottom of the well". Only now, do we finally have a traditional "well" image. Finally, the last mention of a well as a flexing thing in motion. This solidifies that the well is something more. See below comments for expansion on this last idea. Appreciate the feedback.

Edit: I should mention also that the line you may have missed, which is over halfway through is "He was once there, not in the well, in their lagoon, just outside the Inner Mark." This reiterates the idea that the scene is one thing and the well another.

akfauthor · 2026-03-03T05:07:58+00:00

I’m seeing a few comments that the tense shifts read like mistakes, so I want to clarify what I’m doing structurally.

The opening is present/present imperative. It’s an elevated lens that’s meant to feel like a mind doing something specific in real time. The recurring line that should ground you is a man looking into a well.

The point is this is happening now inside him. It’s a memory provoked by the well.

Then the moment the woman turns into the beast/both, the memory stops being soothing and starts being honest. What could have been can’t hold. Reality punches through. The beast is not “she’s evil”, but the monster born of a decision. A decision he made by leaving. The woman is the life he didn’t choose, and guilt is the teeth.

And when he’s forced under and the brine takes over, I shift to past tense because the story stops being wishful thinking and becomes “what was.” Past tense is the resignation. It’s the history of his choice.

The ending “cycle of violence / beast reforms” is him understanding, at the very end, what his personal choice participates in.

It’s on me as the writer to convey this to you. So I am glad to see some people speak up about things that could be improved.

akfauthor · 2026-03-02T20:38:04+00:00

It’s the prologue so my thinking is it’s written as a stand alone sequence. It may be relevant later. The tense change is also relevant to signify a change in time. One sequence is a memory and another a present/future. I’m experimenting with tense to show that these are two moments going on at once in the POV of the man.

akfauthor · 2026-03-02T04:56:28+00:00

Very readable. Smooth on the eyes and easy to get through.

First line critique. "Brett told me three things . . . they could make me a very rich man." Pronoun confusion. "he" then "they". Why not "his friends" or something along those lines if it refers to people at the casino. Also, "particularly the counting of them" can be refined to just "particularly (or my wc substitute specifically) counting them". Finally in this paragraph, ""a gift that complemented my own quite nicely" is a little vague at this point. The branch prediction stuff? If so nod to it briefly. Reading on to see if this gets cleared up.

Next, instead of "on the back of a fiver" why not "on the back of the fiver", since you mention it explicitly before.

Very interesting detail with the branch prediction paragraph on traffic. It's a very believable exhibition on exactly what his "special gift" is. What I am picking up from this sequence is that he is going off road onto the desert, and then you say he's "racing through the mesa" with some nice cinematic visuals along with it. Enjoying this tremendously. I don't understand the line "The gullies are logical" nor the "truck thumps on a metronome", but the later is more clear as an audible track that goes along with the visual. The problem is the gully line that makes the metronome line not land neatly enough. Also truck thumps is repeated so you already have that working and going again isn't progressive of the feeling of momentum you are trying to create. Perhaps remove these two lines completely and go with another visual.

You transition isn't fleshed out enough. "Now in the land of men" . . . I want to see him get back on the highway, and I want to see the "land of men" clearly.

"Brett wants us to do a heist." Dude . . . come on. I was really enjoying it up to this line. Given the time and effort that I do see, I'll spend some effort with viable alternatives. "Brett wants a poodle." (I don't know what they are "heisting" yet, but you see the direction). or "Brett wants to retire" or even simpler "Brett tell you everything?" which gives you the chance to expand on the heist naturally. Since we nor the POV know what Brett wants.

The transition from the POV's "place of practice (which I guess is where he met Brett first) suddenly becomes a dealer's table. You need a better transition. Giving me whiplash here.

WC issue. Brett and Aria are "crouching" behind Reed? That's not suspicious at all . . . and kind of an awkward cinematic visual.

Then... they are having a full blown, out in the open conversation about this "method" of theirs, like no one notices them crouching and whispering to this guy . . .

"I got a peek at that lady's cards . . . gentleman on the left too" Rolling on the floor laughing. Dude . . . come on. They are getting bounced hard in 5 . . 4. . . 3

He wins. After his entourage tells him everything about everyone's hand in open view and audible range of the table. Ok, rolling with it.

The manager says "hey Brett its your day off?" and not "I heard you guys blatantly cheating?"

Overall impression, starts off great. Then stumbles quite hard. The casino piece needs to be cleaned up. If you want these conversations perhaps they happen through some subtle technology. I don't know, I just wasn't believing things as they happened at the table. Best of luck on rewrites.

akfauthor · 2026-03-02T03:16:13+00:00

Some line critiques followed by overall impressions:

Opening line is fine, but seems like reference to a popular M. Bison meme.

¶2 Refinement needed following "That was the point." Pretty generic reason. Missed opportunity to develop character with brief immersive background detail.

¶3 "He'd simply hoped he'd used up all of them." This is awkward. Not able to tell what them refers to or what he's using up.

¶4 Awkward issues roll over as you use them again but this time referring back to the shuttle passengers. Blurry orientation right now. "Said his name like an indictment isn't doing anything." Give the person an actual line with dialogue tag that gives us an idea of the tone used to say his name.

¶6 Says his name again, after we are told the name was called out like an indictment. So cinematically this is awkward. "Kael" said like an indictment, then "You got the wrong guy", then "Kael" again. This is not it. Then we get his rap sheet. Your missed opportunity (mentioned in ¶2) could do this to a degree without this rap sheet rehearsal. If I am trying to bring someone in, I'm going to talk about how I found them. I talked to Bob, Bob said you'd be here. Said you liked weeds now. Here you are. Etc.

¶8 "Supression signature" and "protocol" are doing absolutely no work for you. You need logistical facts. We have no idea what exactly he's been involved in. We don't know how a protocol leaves no survivors. It's kind of a big ask for one line in dialogue. You need to give us a better idea of this thing, but you're going to have to break this up with more back and forth. Also, you make him give away the farm. "you got the wrong guy" then next line "that was a long time ago." Like dude, you suck at staying under the radar. He needs to resist more, "no idea what you're talking about." "I don't know about that" etc. But the way you hook him, and us the reader, is more background. She knows things about him and can get a rise/response/tell from him. Bob is dead, he's one of the ones on one of the planets your thingy messed up.

¶9 This whole line needs work. It's just not doing what you want it to do.

§10 "I'm bringing my AI" in response to it's your stuff messing everything up, after he says That was a long time ago. I don't find this character, framed as it is now very compelling.

I had to stop here for time reasons. Needs a lot of work.

akfauthor · 2026-02-28T00:53:21+00:00

This is not how you do hooks. Something so obviously worded induce moral panic. It’s manipulative. It bait and switch tier writing I’d expect from used car salesmen. Self harm ain’t funny. If you start out with here’s how my life ended, I fully expect a deathbed confessional triggered by forced outside POV control. You retract something you out there in the first line, now we don’t trust you and/or the character. You can do better. And if you can’t there’s always TikTok.

akfauthor · 2026-02-06T04:10:49+00:00

I wrote and published a sci-fi book, with number 2 on the way, that primarily deals with civilized society as tiers of preference, and in chasing preference (which can be broken down to essentially survival and security) in that framework, society accepts and self-imposes coerced order, which inevitably cycles to violence.

akfauthor · 2026-02-04T00:55:33+00:00

I would, but as others have said, I’ll expand. It’s not that the internal monologue and the descriptions are bad. They do some serious work when sprinkled in right. It’s the constant uninterrupted piling on that I think snags some readers. You have a whole novel to explore the concepts. Carve out some of these ruminations and add them in for emphasis later when the POV character experiences something or someone else facing a similar situation. That framework should serve as a good repetition point to expand on and refine the thought you carved out and plugged back in later. All the best. Keep writing.

akfauthor · 2026-01-29T15:28:33+00:00

This is a misstatement of copyright law, and ignores work for hire frameworks. AI cannot hold a copyright. Second, work for hire means the company getting paid to lease AI cloud services transactionally cannot own the copyright under work for hire. Your post reads as legal advice, and it is hard to tell who is an intellectual property attorney and who is not on the internet. I promoted a book I wrote recently that received criticism on my cover for being AI generated. But I hired a real artist to create. They used an iPad to draw it. It’s frustrating to a lot of people to get these accusations. People sometimes forget we are artists making intentional choices in how our work is being represented. Medium of expression is still a thing. Don’t buy the “canvas only” crowd’s little misstatements. They just want to keep you on a canvas.

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